Note: This blog post is based on the first draft of part 3 of my forthcoming paper with Alain Alcouffe, “Adam Smith and the salons of pre-revolutionary Paris” (footnotes are below the fold):
Adam Smith’s primary residence during his sojourn in Paris in 1766 was the Hôtel Parc Royal on the rue du Colombier. Alas, the precise location of the Hôtel du Parc Royal is a mystery. For starters, a street-numbering ordinance was not enacted in Paris until 1768, two years after Smith’s stay in the French capital.[1] Also, according to the Dictionnaire Historique des Rues de Paris (Hillairet 1964, Vol. 1, p. 665), “rue du Colombier” was renamed “rue Jacob” in 1836. It is possible that the Parc Royal was located on today’s 37 rue Jacob or the present 41 rue Jacob; the entries for those particular street numbers in the Dictionnaire Historique des Rues de Paris read “Ex-hôtel” (ibid., p. 666).[2]
Nevertheless, although we do not know much about the Parc-Royal, we know that it was described as one of “the best hotels or lodging houses” in the “Quartier S. Germain des Pres” in the 1768 edition of The Gentleman’s Guide in his Tour through France,[3] and even more importantly, we also know that two of Smith contemporaries, his close friend David Hume and Horace Walpole, the son of a former prime minister, both lodged at the Parc-Royal during their stays in Paris. According to Mossner (1980, p. 504), for example, Hume had relocated to the Parc-Royal in November of 1765 and stayed there until his departure from Paris on January 4, 1766. For his part, Horace Walpole stayed at the Hôtel du Parc Royal from October 1765 until his departure from Paris in April 1766.[4] That such luminaries as David Hume and Horace Walpole would stay at the Parc-Royal is some indication of this hotel’s quality.[5] It is even possible that David Hume recommended the Parc-Royal to Adam Smith and that Smith occupied Hume’s rooms after the latter’s departure on January 4, 1766.
Today, the rue de Colombier is the rue Jacob, a quiet street in the 6th arrondissement of modern-day Paris.[6] At the time of Smith’s stay, however, the rue du Colombier and the rue Jacob formed one long street. Writing in May of 1766, for example, the Reverend William Cole describes the scene thus: “This Rue du Colombier, & the Rue Jacob make one long Street from the Rue du Seine quite down to the River; & the Rue des Petits Augustins, where I lodged came into this long Street, near the Joining together of the Rue du Colombier & the Rue Jacob” (Cole 1931, pp. 52-53, punctuation and spelling in the original).
Back in 1766, the Hôtel du Parc Royal and the rue de Colombier were not only located in one of the most fashionable quarters of Paris at the time, the Faubourg Saint-Germain;[7] they were also in very close proximity to three of the most famed salons of pre-revolutionary Paris, the salons of the Duchesse d’Enville in the hôtel de la Rochefoucauld and that of Madame du Deffand in the Convent of Saint-Joseph as well as the informal salon of her protégée and eventual rival, Mademoiselle Julie Lespinasse, located just down the street. Before proceeding, however, below is a close-up of the “Rue du Colombier,” as it appears on the 1739 Turgot map of Paris, for the reader’s reference. (Notice how close it is to the hôtel de la Rochefoucauld, the location of the salon of the duchess of d’Enville.)
prior probability 